Hundreds of jobs across the Bay Area and California will be impacted by Amazon’s mass layoffs announced this week, part of a sweeping corporate restructuring tied to the company’s accelerating push into artificial intelligence.
The Seattle-based giant plans to cut about 14,000 corporate positions worldwide by early 2026. According to a new filing with state regulators, it includes more than 1,400 jobs in California.
Of those, more than 800 will come from Amazon’s Bay Area offices in Sunnyvale, Palo Alto and Santa Clara, according to filings with the state’s Employment Development Department.
The filings reveal that Amazon is laying off 137 employees in San Francisco, including staff at six downtown offices. The city’s largest cuts will occur at 525 Market, where 71 employees are being let go, followed by 41 at 188 Spear Street. Roles range widely – from software engineers and UX designers to legal counsel, sustainability specialists and PR managers – suggesting the reductions extend beyond Amazon’s technical workforce.
Hundreds of jobs across the Bay Area and California will be impacted by Amazon’s mass layoffs announced this week. CEO Andy Jassy said the company expects advances in generative AI to streamline operations. (Amazon)
In Silicon Valley, Palo Alto will lose 176 jobs, primarily in software development and applied science, and Sunnyvale another 391, spread across offices on Enterprise Way, Eleventh Avenue and Discovery Way. In Santa Clara, 76 positions are being cut, many from engineering and recruiting teams.
Most of the affected workers are software development engineers.
The layoffs are slated to take effect Jan. 26, and come as Amazon reallocates resources to its growing AI and robotics divisions.
“We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president for people experience and technology, wrote in a memo to staff this week.
Amazon, which employs about 350,000 corporate workers globally and roughly 7,500 in the Bay Area, said the restructuring will allow it to “reduce bureaucracy” and “invest in our biggest bets.”
CEO Andy Jassy has previously said the company expects advances in generative AI to streamline operations and reshape how it deploys talent.
The new filings also confirm significant losses beyond Northern California – including 333 jobs in Irvine, 152 in Culver City, 130 in Santa Monica and 145 in San Diego – many tied to gaming, Prime Video and entertainment divisions.
Taken together, the filings push Amazon’s total announced California layoffs to roughly 1,450 – slightly higher than initial estimates – underscoring the scale of the company’s realignment.
The company’s announcement adds to a cascade of recent tech job cuts. Applied Materials, headquartered in Santa Clara, filed notice that 363 employees will be laid off across its Bay Area offices by late December.
Meta Platforms also disclosed 318 job losses at its Menlo Park headquarters, largely within its AI and engineering teams.
For San Francisco, where Amazon had quietly expanded its footprint over the past decade, the layoffs mark one of the city’s largest corporate tech reductions this year – another setback for a downtown still struggling to recover its pre-pandemic vitality.
The latest cuts follow earlier reductions of 27,000 positions in 2023, when Amazon trimmed staff across its retail, human resources and cloud divisions.
This article originally published at Amazon’s mass layoffs hit 1,450 California jobs, including hundreds in Bay Area.
